Jumat, 25 Desember 2009

ARTICLE REVIEW Quantitative assessment of a Senge learning organization1 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Leaders of twenty-first century organizations are searching for ways to improve the ability of their organizations to respond more rapidly to their challenges” (Kiedrowski, 2006).

In line with the above perspective, Kiedrowski in his article Quantitative assessment of a Senge learning organization proposed Senge’s model of learning organization (LO) to be implemented in organizations. Kiedrowski conducted research by intervening Senge LO at a single company, Bank ABC in Division 123. He found out that Senge LO positively associated with employees’ attitudes which led to positive impact of the performance of Bank ABC.

There are three main reasons why Kiedrowsky undertook his research. Firstly, He contended that Senge’s model of LO has been enormously favoured by many authors but lack of empirical investigation of LO intervention. Secondly, the author referred Ellinger’s et al. notice that establishing the associations between characteristic of LO and organisational performance is the major challenge found in literature. Lastly, there has not been research about the intervention of Senge LO in a single organization.

Kiedrowski conducted comprehensive quantitative assessment of Senge LO intervention in a division of a major US banking from 2000 to 2004. The subjects of the initial study were 1,547 employees in the Division 123 of Bank ABC and over 100,000 employees of the bank was treatened as the control group. The main purposes of the researcher are to investigate the impact of Senge LO to the improvement of employee acceptance of LO concepts and to figure out wether or not the acceptance increase job satisfaction.

_________________________________________________________________

1. Kiedrowski, P. J. (2006). Quantitative assessment of Senge learning organization intervention. The Learning Organization, 13(4),369-383. Retrieved on 18 July 2006, from www.emeraldinsight.com/0969-6474.htm.

The author reported that in 1998 Division 123 of Bank ABC acquired new six groups and expanded its products. This change led to poor profitability of the division and the author found out that the employee morale was low. Overall, based on survey undertaken in 2000 the employee job satisfaction was worse than the average for Bank ABC. To alter this condition, senior managers adopted a theory of organisational change: that was by advocating Senge’s concept of LO. After all preparations to implement Senge LO, they began to develop a shared statement of the division’s mission, vision, and values. Following they conducted training of the top 80 division managers in 2001, where all aspects of Senge LO: shared vision, mental models, personal mastery, team learning and systems thinking, were covered in the program. Survey conducted in summer 2002 revealed that positive changes in employee acceptance of Senge LO and employee job satisfaction occurred. However, some continuing weaknesses were identified. Then, they revised the division’s mission, vision, and values. In January 2003, the head of the division wrote an open memorandum to all division members describing the importance of learning and Senge LO. In the late of the year, the division developed a team member website to enhance communication among them.

The key findings of the research are: employees in Division 123 accepted Senge LO concept and their job satisfaction increased significantly. However, the study also revealed that there was no statistically difference in job satisfaction between the division and control group. The writer should have explored the reason why there was no difference in job satisfaction between the Division 123 with the control group in his study. Such analysis will be useful in determining the weaknesses in implementing Senge LO. Nevertheless, this article has put significant contribution to organizations that are searching concepts to be used to improve employee job satisfaction and morale. It is highly recommended for organisational leaders and students of leadership and management to read this article.

Minggu, 08 November 2009

Using Jumbled-letter Board (Jumbo) in teaching ESL vocabulary

Abstract

This proposed study is aiming at investigating the using Jumbled-letter Board (Jumbo) in the teaching of ESL vocabulary. Specifically the study will seek the effect of the Jumbo towards the students’ motivation in learning ESL vocabulary and to find out its effect towards students’ achievement in vocabulary test. The subjects of the research will be the seventh grade students of SMPN 25 Bima, a secondary school in Indonesia. The design of the study is Non-equivalent Posttest Only Design in which 35 students of class 1A are as the experimental group and 35 students of class 1B as the controlled group. Three data collection techniques will be applied in this study. They are observation sheet, questionnaire, and achievement test. Observation sheet and questionnaire are used to determine the association between the using of Jumbo towards students’ motivation while achievement test is implemented to examine the effect of Jumbo towards the students’ achievement in learning ESL vocabulary. Both data from observation sheet and questionnaire are going to be analyzed using Pearson Correlation Coefficient statistic whereas the test result of the two groups will be analyzed using a t-test statistic analysis. It is likely that there is positive association between the using of Jumbo and students’ motivation in learning ESL vocabulary and there is significant difference between the achievement of the students who are given treatment and students who do not receive the treatment.